Sonic Solutions has introduced DVD Producer, a DVD production system for multimedia professionals, at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show.
DVD Producer is available in two versions, a software-only release costing $4,000, and a $13,00 mworkstation version that includes the company’s SD-1000 real-time MPEG encoding board. No UK pricing is available yet.
Central to DVD Producer are two new technologies, JumpAnywhere and OpenDVD. JumpAnywhere is an automatic navigation technology. It allows users to mix 4:3 and 16:9 aspect-ratio video, using a wide range of formats, with eight audio streams and 32 subtitle streams on each video clip.
ROM file
OpenDVD includes the project file on a finished DVD in the ROM portion of the disc. This allows users to make changes to a disc from the finished media. If that media is DVD-R, the altered materials can be burned to another drive – if it’s DVD-RW, it can be rewritten back to the same disc using a technology that Sonic calls Edit-on-DVD.
DVD Producer also includes MyDVD for real-time MPEG-2 compression from DV input via IEEE 1394 (FireWire) and DVD recording.
Sonic has also announced a new MPEG encoding board, the SD-500. This sits at the bottom of the company’s encoding board product line, and is a Windows-based encoder that accepts YUV, S-Video and FireWire video input. The SD-500 will ship in May for $5,000.
Other new releases at NAB include a workstation version of the ReelDVD corporate-level DVD authoring tool. It includes the SD-500 and costs $6,000. A Windows version of the SD-2000 high-end MPEG encoding board is also on show, and costs $25,000.
Sonic announced that it has spun off its audio division into a new company, Sonic Studio, which will concentrate on promoting audio tools such as SonicStudio HD.